Mamie's Food

Leiths Foundation term ended with a mixture of emotions, from relief at finishing exams to sadness at saying goodbye to new friends.

The weeks leading up to Christmas were a turning point for me and skills I’d been learning for the past two months finally began to make sense. My disastrous attempts at shortcrust pastry finally resulted in a Normandy apple tart and I successfully made my first ever white chocolate naked celebration cake.

Group buffet cooking in the penultimate week was a definite highlight. We conjured up a feast of chicken skewers, lamb koftas, tabbouleh, babba ganoush, hummus, baked butterbeans and feta, zataar flatbreads, garlic and chilli broccoli and a semolina cake for pudding. As much as I love cooking ‘Leiths style’, it was exciting to have the freedom to choose our own recipes.

Over the Christmas break I was hard at it trying to keep cooking and I was lucky to do work experience with caterer and canape Queen Milli Taylor . Arriving at a beautiful house in Wimbledon I followed her lead, assembling leek and parmesan filo tartlets, smoked salmon blinis and beef, rocket and truffle mayo crostini.

The new year began with catering a 12 person dinner party in Oxfordshire, which was nerve wracking to say the least. On the menu was caramelised red onion tart, roast duck with butternut squash dauphinoise and a red wine jus, as well as orange and vanilla panna cottas with almond biscuits. Luckily I had Peter (the bf) to help me through it as I bossily ordered him around and was delighted to leave with three more dinner parties lined up.

Beginning the Intermediate term has been encouraging and highly sugar based with creme brulee, brown butter madeleines and something called a Paris-Brest ( google it) to contend with, all of which aren’t as simple as they seem. Dishes like a spicy prawn laksa, octopus with paprika and crispy squid are already a leap up from beef stew and mashed potato from the foundation. So far, I’ve had no disasters (!?) but who knows what the next few weeks will bring…